Ohio Law School Dean Is Named As New President of City College

By KAREN W. ARENSON

Published: March 27, 2001

The trustees of the City University of New York yesterday named an Ohio law school dean as president of City College, a once-storied campus that is under enormous pressure to raise standards but still provide access for many poorly prepared high school graduates.

CUNY officials said the new president, Gregory H. Williams, 57, was an experienced educational administrator whose impoverished and racially mixed background would help him identify with many CUNY students but who also had the management skills and vision to solve the campus's myriad problems.

Dr. Williams will take over a college that was once CUNY's flagship, known for turning out renowned graduates like Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Malamud, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, as well as eight Nobel Prize winners. Despite lingering strengths, it is now more often known for the large numbers of students who cannot pass CUNY's placement tests and the state's teacher certification exams. Morale is low. Finances are strained.

Many longtime professors say they have not had a strong president since Robert E. Marshak in the 1970's. CUNY's board pressured the college's last president, Yolanda T. Moses, to resign in 1999, saying she was not providing the leadership the troubled campus needed.

Dr. Williams's job will be to re-establish the college's academic credibility while not shutting out minorities and other disadvantaged students, a difficult challenge. His progress will be closely watched within CUNY and across the country, since many colleges and universities face the same challenges, though few have the expectations placed on them that City College does because of its long history as the ''poor man's Harvard.''

Dr. Williams, dean of the law school at Ohio State University, brings a provocative biography to a campus in Harlem where race has been an open issue since the late 1960's, a time when black and Hispanic leaders pressed for an open-admissions policy.

The son of a white mother who abandoned the family before he was 10 and an alcoholic father who was partly African-American, Dr. Williams grew up in the black housing projects of Muncie, Ind., and worked at multiple jobs to help feed himself and his family before he was a teenager. He almost did not go to college, but ultimately graduated from Ball State (working as a deputy sheriff to help pay his way) and then earned both a Ph.D. in political science and a law degree from George Washington University.

He described those hard times in an autobiography, ''Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black'' (Dutton, 1995). In it, he describes how, when his parents separated and he and his father and brother joined his father's family, he suddenly discovered that his light-skinned father who had passed as Italian was really black.

Much of Dr. Williams's professional career, first at George Washington University, then at the University of Iowa and now in Ohio, has been focused on increasing opportunity for minority students. At Iowa, for example, he helped develop a weekend program to introduce high school and college students to law and to the University of Iowa law school.

At Ohio State, he has raised about $25 million in outside gifts and has tried to develop programs that would be among the best in the country, like one in alternative dispute resolution. That strategic emphasis is similar to the plan at CUNY to develop niches where the university's strength would help burnish its overall reputation.

Unlike CUNY's recent appointment of Jennifer J. Raab, an ally of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, as the next president of Hunter College -- she was chosen by the trustees despite a different recommendation by the chancellor, Matthew Goldstein -- Dr. Williams was backed by both the chancellor and the board.

All of CUNY's trustees approved his appointment, except for the student trustee, who abstained.

Herman Badillo, CUNY's chairman and a City College graduate, said he hoped that Dr. Williams would evaluate everything at the college -- from remedial instruction to teacher education -- and make improvements everywhere.

''When people think of CUNY, they think of City College,'' he said. ''I want to make it the flagship institution it used to be.''

But Dr. Williams's reception on campus when he takes over in early August could be a bit rockier. Some faculty leaders said the other finalist, Robert J. Reinstein, dean of Temple University Law School, had a clearer vision for the campus. And some City College students protested that the search had not been wide enough and that they had not had enough of a voice, although two students sat on the search committee.

Martha Flores-Vazquez, head of the graduate student government at City College and a search committee member, said students were also concerned that Dr. Williams ''did not seem to know the issues on campus and didn't understand why remediation is important to us.''

Photo: Gregory H. Williams, a law school dean, will take over at City College. (Wagner International)(pg. B4)